


i feel like prey (i feel like praying)

by comehereoften



Series: the undone and the divine [3]
Category: Jane the Virgin (TV)
Genre: F/F, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-19
Updated: 2018-01-23
Packaged: 2019-02-04 12:26:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12771042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/comehereoften/pseuds/comehereoften
Summary: We keep falling apart because we can't stop falling together.





	1. she can't find the words to say i don't want your hands on another man's vetebrae

**Author's Note:**

> The last part of this series, half from Luisa's PoV and half from Rose's. Some of this references things from the previous work and will make more sense if you check that piece out before this one. Unsurprisingly dedicated to [shatterthelight](http://archiveofourown.org/users/shatterthelight) and our never-ending suffering.

Luisa is out of time.

Her sixth month lease is up and the owner of her apartment decided they want to move back after all. As usual she'd been promised something that was then cut short, and with nowhere else to go she's going back to the Marbella.

Allison had broken things off too, said she couldn't take anymore distance, anymore poor excuses to push her away. In a way Luisa's relieved, reassured that things were severed before she could shatter them. In another she's bitter, choking on the sour taste of her own undeniable deficiency.

She wonders if that's how the universe feels. Grinding her between its teeth just to spit her back out when it realises she's too sharp to swallow. It wouldn't be the first.

Her life is in bits, and now it's in boxes. Packing up everything she's slowly started to accumulate over the last half of the year. The strings of fairy lights she festoons over every surface, as if she can bring the stars inside. The eclectic collection of mugs she'd bought to replace standard issue hotel crockery; the seventeen different types of tea she'd stockpiled to brew in them. Four incense burners, two bead curtains, and God knows what she's going to do with that cactus.

She folds four of her shirts neatly before taking the whole drawer out of her dresser and tipping it into the box labelled "clothes", forces everything in with a decent amount of elbow grease and a lot more parcel tape. Finally the mess of her life is contained, stowed away and sealed and for once not spilling out over every available surface.

Her thoughts drift back to Allison, and she holds no ill will but she can't help but feel a little lost. Still she couldn't blame her, Luisa knows she's been isolating from more than one woman in her life. Withdrawing from the world. For people like her that's a warning sign, bold and bright and blaring. Flickering neon arrows directing her back to an all too familiar path of guaranteed escapism, one she's travelled too many times before and has no desire to walk again. Not today at least.

She shakes her head, uproots the thought before it can take hold and blossom into obsession. Luisa goes back to scrawling illegible labels on boxes before this dimension's distaste for her becomes apparent again, and another dark seed blooms onto her phone screen. Her thumb hovers over the answer button and she pauses, sighs, presses down and brings the phone to her ear.

"What do you want, Rose?"

_"Good afternoon to you too."_

Even through the tinny speaker her voice is melodic, mellifluous. Even in irritation.

"I'm kind of busy here."

Luisa pays no heed to Rose's sniping. She pulls the cap off a marker with her teeth and scribbles "hippy shit" on a box that rattles with chunks of quartz and other crystals.

_"I don't want to get in your way."_

_She doesn't see the irony._ Luisa thinks.

"Well you've got me now, so what is it?"

She hears Rose clear her throat, attempt to approach her with caution.

_"I know you're moving back today, I just hope things won't be difficult."_

Luisa drops her pen on the floor, brings her now free hand to her temple and massages heavy circles into the pressure point.

"And by things you mean me."

She's infuriating. It's hard enough trying to pull a straight answer out of her when they're alone but when they're not Luisa may as well be speaking to a brick wall. Or more accurately glass, mortar is porous and Rose is most certainly not.

_"I want us to be civil."_

Luisa boils over. "You're such a fucking hypocrite sometimes."

_"Excuse me?"_

"Last time I saw you was at that dinner last month and we didn't even speak, now you're calling to ask if we can be adults about this? You're the one that came to me that night-"

Rose winces at the excavation of their pre-wedding indiscretion, Luisa doesn't let it interrupt her.

"I don't want to be back there any more than you want me to. And I know it's not guilt that made you call because that would require a conscience."

_"Luisa-"_

"Look, I'm not coming to fuck anything up for you, I just need a place to stay. Stay out of my way and I'll stay out of yours."

_"Fine. See you tonight."_

Luisa is picturing Rose's narrowed eyes and icy expression as she hears the line go dead. She wants to feel satisfied that she didn't allow Rose the high ground she somehow thinks she deserves, but her heat is waning to something that only simmers and as she cools her compunction condenses. The conscience thing was a blow aimed lower than she's comfortable with, and now she has enough guilt for the both of them.

Luisa lets out a groan, lets her phone fall out of her hand and onto the carpet. She scrunches her eyes shut, pinches the bridge of her nose and breathes through the whispers of how to alcoholically assuage remorse.

She opens her eyes and glances round at the boxes, the compartmentalisation of her chaos. Luisa retrieves her phone and it tells her there's time before the movers come to carry her off so she swipes to the browser, pulls up a meeting list. Hopes she can draw strength from like-minded strangers before she winds up back at the door of all the people and places and things that she should avoid.

 

**_..._ **

 

Twelve days. She hasn't even been back at the hotel a full two weeks and already she's clawing at the walls. Luisa's sure the universe spat her back out just to laugh at her as somehow she's ended up back in the same room as before. Whoever thought it would be a comfort is sorely misguided, and she's no clairvoyant but all she can see are ghosts. The patch of wallpaper that she had stared at as she decided to finally move out, the crack in the ceiling she poured all her tears into as she lay back and refused to let them fall. The bed she and Rose turned to ash, coalesced in only to cremate.

It haunts her. All of it. Right from when the movers carried in the few things of hers that wouldn't be waylaid in storage, their black uniforms making them resemble a funeral procession. Now she's wading through the embers of this pyre, choking on the smoke and the spirits and singeing the soles of her feet as she wonders why the world won't let her move on.

By some miracle the wraith she fears the most has yet to appear. She'd seen Rose once, breezing into her halfhearted homecoming before blowing back out, tossing a kiss towards her cheek that didn't quite land and left her with nothing but the chill of a winter wind. Lifting the bumps on her skin, the hairs on her neck, causing ice to crystallise in her veins as Rose swept off with an artificial apology and without looking at her once. Luisa wonders why she came at all, before realising that for Rose there's nothing as important as pretences.

That was twelve days ago, and the doctor in her knows that by now her blood should be starting to decompose and her organs will have long since started to bloat, and if it wasn't for the absence of the stench of death she wouldn't be sure she's still alive. Not here, in this room in this place where her constant pacing becomes the slow weave of a burial shroud sewn right into the carpet.

Luisa hates it here. Feeling managed. Feeling under observation. Her whole family just waiting for her to break and looking at her in a way that makes her feel like her whole life is spent on suicide watch. They don't seem to realise the only thing suffocating her is their insistence on drafting her story in her mother's blood. Even before the drinking, before the breakdown, genetics was enough to make them loop the rope around her neck and wait for her to fall.

It's the one way she refuses to let them down. They may have written her off but she won't be written out. Even now she's bold and brilliant and breathing and she won't be spooked by yesterday's ghosts.

 

**_..._ **

 

Two weeks, four days and three poor excuses not to make it to dinner with her family, and Luisa can't seem to wheedle her way out of this one. Not to mention every time her father reiterates the importance of family he unknowingly raises the tripwire of guilt, and now it's too high to jump over.

The restaurant is heaving, and usually the swell of so many bodies would make Luisa feel smothered but tonight it's a comfort, as she walks in and tries to drown out her own thoughts in the humming sea of so many voices. The waiter directs her to their table, and as she approaches her stomach drops too far to allow her to laugh at the cosmic joke the universe seems intent on always making her the punchline of.

The table isn't flanked by chairs but wrapped in a cushioned booth, it's three occupants wedged along the crescent and leaving one space on the end that, naturally, is next to Rose. Rose who looks up as Luisa arrives, hovers, fails to sit. Rose who's clad in something tight and white and ridiculously well tailored. Rose whose fake smile only falters for a second.

"I didn't realise you would be joining us." Rose pries her clenched jaw open and her sentiments seem to snag on her teeth, and something burns behind her eyes.

Emilio is oblivious to the heat. "I wasn't sure you would." He jokes but the allusion to his daughter's shortcomings still stings.

Luisa ignores them both. "Sorry I'm late."

She swallows back the unpleasant thing rising in her throat and slides into the seat, teeters on the edge and tenses every muscle in the hope she won't touch the woman next to her.

Her family's expectant eyes press for further explanation. "Meeting." Luisa says simply.

Rafael's stare is the first to roll. "Why do you still need those things? You're not drinking are you?"

The first jab punctures her calm, and Luisa steadies herself with a deep inhale before she can start to deflate.

"No. But I might be if I didn't go."

Luisa knows they'll never really understand; that, regardless of however many times she tries to explain, their sympathy can only stretch so far. At this point it's better for her not to endlessly justify herself, still that doesn't make it easier.

"Sitting with a group of people complaining about their lives would make me _want_ to drink." Rafael grumbles.

Her father sighs, Rose glares, Luisa wrestles the anger building in her clenched fists and refuses to set it free.

"That's not how it works." She grimaces. "I have an illness, I need to treat it."

It's never been alcohol that's the problem, it's that it becomes the solution to her problems. That her diseased brain whispers to her that the answer is to escape, and once she starts to run she can't stop, not for anything. Drinking is the ugliest symptom to a much wider, much farther reaching ailment; one that can't be cured, only managed. One that her family find more comfort in denying the existence of than accepting and acknowledging how hard she has to fight.

Rafael decides he's bored with the conversation and an uncomfortable silence falls over the table. Luisa drops her gaze to where her hands are balled in her lap, she knows it's useless hoping they'll ever really empathise, and wishing they could would mean them having to share her affliction in the first place. Still it grates, abrades at everything she's worked for to be knocked back again and again just for trying, just for living.

She's sinking into an icy pool of hurt just as a solicitous hand reaches for her own. Luisa looks up and Rose is facing the other way but she lays a soothing touch for just a moment, her hand falls away and the warmth is gone before Luisa can be sure it was real.

Emilio breaks the silence by beckoning the waiter and insisting they order before it can get any later. They do, and it's not until the waiter returns with the wine that Luisa notices for once she's not the only one abstaining. Rose sips at a soda water propped up with nothing stronger than a lime.

Luisa drifts from the conversation, tunes out and lets her thoughts float downstream and the steady bright trickle of introspection flows into something deeper, some place darker. A glance round the table affirms to her that there's no imminent push for her to be included in the dialogue, and when her eyes land on Rose she allows them to stay. Allows herself to look at her for the first time all evening, the first time in months.

It's strange, the Rose she knows is determined, resolute and beautiful woven together into something godly. The Rose she knows is fierce, assured and composed and wicked sharp when she wants something. The Rose she knows can still turn soft despite it, can still turn all her thorns to petals just to let them fall and rain down in a clement storm of compassion and invisible kisses.

This is not that Rose.

This Rose looks hollow, burnt out, she's ash behind glass. This Rose is a shadow, all of the absence and none of the light. This Rose is wrapped in smoke, a filmy haze of grey Luisa is afraid to reach her hand towards in case it closes around nothing but vapour. And she may be the polished picture of pristine but she's precisely that, an image. A reprint running out of ink.

The Rose she knows comes alive beneath Luisa's fingertips, this is not that woman.

This Rose is not hers.

Still she carries secrets in her skin only Luisa can see, the place behind her ear that pulls an inimitable timbre of moan every time Luisa presses her lips to it. The freckle on her chest she always hated until Luisa traced it with reverence. The faint scar on her hip that still makes her hold back a wince; one night buried in their 3AM sheets and tangled in placidity Rose had revealed the defaced flesh is laced with gunpowder. That she was just eighteen and the bullet had only grazed but God had it _hurt_. That the memory still does and the reminder she is less than perfect festers. Only then had her flinch been audible, and Luisa had captured it between gentle palms and ameliorated the trauma entrusted to her.

"Luisa?" Her father's voice prompts her thoughts to resurface.

"Hm?" Luisa's eyes snap up and she forces something she hopes resembles a smile.

"I said how long will you be staying with us."

"Oh." She searches for something to say that won't inspire disappointment. "I'm not sure."

To no avail. She's met with well-rehearsed sighs, so attempts to assuage.

"I'm already looking for somewhere new."

Any reply is cut short as Rose starts spluttering on her drink. Emilio assists in steadying her with a hand to her back and as her coughing subsides his hand slides down her spine but doesn't fall away. Luisa feels a lump rising in her own throat, feels a pounding in her temple and there's a loud splash as Rafael refills his glass and it's enough to send her over the edge.

Still she won't let it, she sinks her fingers into the brink of her resolve and excuses herself before she can let go. Luisa walks swiftly to the bathroom and all but falls through the door, grips the edge of the sink and finds space to breathe among the bone white of her knuckles and the blare of polished tile.

Cool air works its way back into her lungs and the painful throbbing at the side of her skull starts to peter out. Luisa's fingers start to slacken and she straightens, lifts her head and looks into the mirror and finds herself in the reality of her reflection. The world doesn't stop spinning but it slows just enough that she isn't so desperate to jump off, and she's gathering all her fragments back up in shaking hands as the door opens. Luisa clears her throat and expects to turn to a stranger but before she can Rose's reflection comes into focus next to her own.

She's dead-eyed, distant, but even though she appears so closed off she embodies the hermetic she's _here_. Luisa doesn't know whether to shout or cry, more than anything she doesn't know where to look. Her eyes give Rose a once over, then twice, and the only thing she winds up doing is wondering whether Rose buys her dresses or has them sprayed on. If she wasn't treading a maelstrom of anger and agony she might be able to appreciate either eventuality. But she is, and the raging storm of emotion accumulates in a scowl and exasperated sigh.

"Tell me you _didn't_ follow me in here." Luisa gripes.

Rose remains vacant, adjusts her already flawlessly styled hair. "I was worried." She states plainly, tucking nonexistent strands of red behind her ear.

Luisa raises her eyebrows and grapples with incredulity. "If this is what you categorise as concern you have a weird way of showing it."

They stare at each other through the glass, as if bouncing looks off each other's echoed image affords them some degree of safety. Luisa waits for a reply, lets the silence play out until it breaches the border of discomfort, and eventually something in Rose's eyes reawakens and what tumbles out of her mouth is a surprisingly soft admission of,

"I think we should talk."

Luisa can feel herself giving in but there's still enough heat in her to relight frustration so she fires it up and remains removed.

"There's nothing to say."

It comes out tainted with more defeat than she knew she had in her, and she turns to go but Rose turns too and blocks her path, an auburn avalanche falling less than a foot from her.

"Please, this is childish." It almost sounds pleading, but Rose never lets herself stoop that low and Luisa knows that grovelling is the antithesis of everything Rose believes she is.

"Says the woman who won't let me fucking leave." Luisa gives back.

Still Rose doesn't step aside, and in a move beyond bold she touches a finger beneath Luisa's jaw and encourages eye contact.

"Talk to me." Rose imbues the words with a tenderness that Luisa can't bring herself to believe.

Luisa focuses on the sentiments and less on their softness and Rose's oh-so familiar entitlement becomes apparent. It's infuriating how she expects access, infuriating how Luisa still wants to let her in. Infuriating how the only care she's ever known not to come with conditions emanates from the woman who won't stop walking away. The fury coagulates her blood and solidifies her decision to claim control and for once not be left behind.

Luisa bats Rose's hand away, she turns back to the mirror and Rose is drawn with her by the impalpable pull between them, can't help but revolve around her as Luisa spins and Rose is lost to her axis. Luisa stares her down with all the heat of the sun and the hitch of Rose's breath confirms that she's already unraveling just to spool on Luisa's little finger.

She won't let herself be toyed with anymore, won't let Rose pull on the strings of her heart in moments of weakness just to let go and leave her to free-fall. Not when Rose likes to think she always has the upper hand but is always the one reaching for her, proffering control so Luisa reaches back. Only between Luisa's fingers does Rose lose her omnipotence, she trades it in willingly and only in Luisa's hands can their power create rather than destroy.

Luisa can already taste defeat but this time it isn't hers, she licks her lips and takes a step that pushes Rose back up against the marble counter of the sink, and the way she can steer her before they even touch tells her Rose is already starting to concede.

Their disparity in height means Luisa's eyes are level with Rose's perfectly painted mouth and she wields it as her greatest weapon, makes no move to lift her gaze any further and dips her words in honey, drips them onto Rose's lips.

"What do you want to talk about?" Each syllable is thick and sweet and sticks like syrup.

Rose swallows, hard. As though trying to stomach something sickly and cloying that's stuck in her throat and trapping breath.

Luisa lifts a hand to Rose's shoulder, dances the pads of her fingers along her collarbone before she crooks them and captures the strap of Rose's dress; she pulls so lightly she can't help but smirk when all of Rose follows her gentle coaxing and leans into her.

Rose is lost, lost for words and losing control and losing the battle her head is waging on her heart. She's entranced, enraptured, utterly hypnotised. Her hand finds its way to Luisa's waist and she surrenders entirely when the other follows suit and pulls Luisa against her, kisses her with little regard for war wounds. Luisa melts against the white flag Rose's dress now resembles, wraps her up in bittersweet subjugation and seizes the taste of victory from Rose's lips.

Luisa lays her hand along Rose's jaw and drags her thumb over her cheek, lifts her other hand to her neck and lets the fervent tattoo of Rose's pulse bruise into her palm. Rose loosens her grip on Luisa's waist only to knit her fingers together over the small of her back and insist on a degree of closeness that rivals neutron star collision. They coalesce into an impossible hybrid of victor and spoils and hormonal high schoolers, a heated game of taboo explorations as their souls escape their bodies and tangle on the battlefield.

As little as she wants to, Luisa becomes increasingly aware that every second their lips continue to connect is another they could be interrupted by unwanted company. She starts to pull away, struggles to extricate herself as Rose is helpless to follow every tilt, every lean, every inch of movement. They part but their mouths are all that call for distance as they stay entwined and Luisa rests their foreheads together, and they match each other breath for laboured breath.

Eventually she looks up, touches the tip of her nose to Rose's before untangling herself completely. She stands back and can't help but admire the smearing of Rose's lipstick, before noticing Rose looks aghast, as though her own body just betrayed her and she can't understand why. The mess of her makeup and heavy air of disbelief are enough to leave Luisa suitably smug.

Luisa nods. "Good talk." She smirks.

She turns and walks straight out of the door, leaving Rose overthrown and flailing, a gasping mess in her wake. Luisa heads back to the table with new energy coursing through her veins, she wipes at her mouth with the back of her hand and all but shivers in delight when she notices the red smudges, a cosmetic semblance of bloodstains. She reaches the table and slides into her seat with a thousand times more ease than before, her father looks up, Rafael doesn't.

"Where's your stepmother?" Emilio queries.

Luisa bites down on her lip before her smile can give too much away.

"Fixing her lipstick."

 

**_..._ **

 

It's been a week. A week since the restaurant, a week since they've plummeted back into radio silence. A week for the initial satisfaction to wear off and give way to a whirlpool of emotion that maintains a steady spin somewhere between frustration and longing. Rose has entire cities of people pinned down beneath her thumb, and yet she relinquishes it all as soon as she's on the other end of Luisa's stare; at first it had felt like an achievement, and the theory always will but in practice the gratification always peaks just to make way for a gaping trough of vexation.

Luisa's grateful for work, for something to occupy her heart and mind and fill the emotional lacuna Rose always leaves her with. But as blessed as she feels to be able to help others where she can't help herself, it's only temporary, and even if it wasn't it fulfils a different need. Her affinity for nurture has an outlet, an occupation and an answer. The interminably unrequited outpourings of her heart are something harder to navigate. Now her day has drawn to a close, and there's a full weekend free of distraction for her thoughts to start to swirl and suck her in until she's drowning in her own flood.

The elevator dings, the doors slide open and Luisa makes her way back to her room clutching a plastic cup of freshly iced tea. Her free hand rummages for her keycard and just as she extracts it from the depths of her purse she rounds the corner and looks up to see Rose, switching her weight back and forth on nervous feet and wringing her hands as she hovers outside Luisa's door. Flashes of feeling lightning bolt in Luisa's chest, surprise, smugness, exasperation. One incandescent bolt after another jarring her bones.

Rose is too consumed by her own disquietude to notice Luisa, let alone the tornado in her torso. Luisa throws caution to the wind howling through her ribs and walks up as if she's unshaken. Waltzes right up beside her and doesn't earn a glance until her wry enquiry of, "Lost?" Startles Rose and she turns to face her.

Rose's hands stop wringing themselves out and she crosses her arms. "Hilarious." She replies, as drily as she can.

Luisa shrugs. "Would explain why I haven't seen you since we-"

Rose cuts her off by loudly clearing her throat. "That's why I'm here."

Luisa takes an obnoxious slurp of tea, silently gloats in the way Rose's irritated eyes follow her every movement. "Oh?" She raises both eyebrows, embodies the picture of innocence.

Rose inches forward, lowers her voice to a clandestine cadence. "It shouldn't have happened. It was-" She glances round the empty hallway, takes her tone all the way down to a whisper. "A mistake."

Luisa sucks at her straw and swallows loudly, and any lingering anger is rethreaded with amusement. If this were a first she might be annoyed but they'd walked this path so many times before they were wearing it down with their own footprints. She knows these tracks better than the back of her hand, knows it's only a matter of time before the footholds give way again, they've never stood their ground long with the other in sight.

"I guess you can call it that..." Luisa begins

"It was." Rose attempts to interject.

"... Since you made it." Luisa finishes, polishes it off with the kind of smile that teases sin from saints.

Rose opens her mouth to reply as a nearby door opens and a couple emerges from their suite. She jumps back as they walk past, drops her folded arms and smoothes her already creaseless skirt. She turns her head, turns her fake smile all the way up and offers it less than graciously as they wander by oblivious. Rose turns back to Luisa, bared teeth starting to grit.

"Don't you have a girlfriend?" If the question was supposed to scathe it falls beyond short, emerges embittered.

"We broke up." Luisa deadpans.

Rose softens, visibly caught off guard. The tangling of her fingers centres on the heavy ring anchored to her fourth finger, and she twists it as though trying to relieve restricted blood flow. She casts her eyes down to the floor, swallows back the spite she had been intent on spitting.

"I'm sorry to hear that." She murmurs, like if she's quiet enough she can tamp down the sliver of sincerity, deny the even slighter fragment of secret pleasure.

"Mhmm." Luisa hums, bites down on her straw and chews contemplatively. "Don't you have a husband?" The barb burns through her filter as she catches Rose fidgeting with the imposing jewel encompassing her finger.

Rose stiffens, all traces of sympathy drain from her like blood from lifeless cheeks. Her hands fall flat by her sides and her whole body becomes carved ice, sculpted by angels but ice nonetheless. Statuesque and unforgiving and impossibly cold. Desperately desolate. Glacial.

Something sharper and slicker than lightning strikes Luisa's chest, precise and pointed. A poisonous pang slicing swiftly through flesh. She remains unshaken simply because the feeling is not unfamiliar. In a way she wishes it hurt more, in a way she said it because she knew it would. And in a way she wishes she felt worse but she's _tired_. Tired of waiting. Tired of wanting.

If it were anyone else she would be tired of giving too. She is tired of decanting her heart into the bottomless well of everybody who never loves her back, but with Rose it's different, with Rose she can't help but pour. This thing, love or otherwise, is too big for her body and it always has been; it overspills and with nowhere else to go she started to bleed out, and then there was Rose. Rose who's no stranger to the taste of blood. Rose who likes to think she's void of love when they both feel the rebirth of her pulse whenever Luisa's near.

Rose who carries herself from place to place based solely on what she might take but has so much empty space to fill, and Luisa wants to give and give and knows underneath it all, behind all the smoke and the mirrors, Rose can't help but want her to. Can't help but love her back.

Currently requital is the furthest thing from Rose's mind, as she stands before Luisa with verglas on her skin and frost on her breath.

"I mean it." Her glare is piercing, snowdrift cold. "We can't do this again."

It's biting, Luisa can't help but bite back.

"We can't? Or _you_ can't?"

Rose doesn't have an answer, as if despite the frostbite she can't quite bring herself to let go. Luisa sighs, swipes her keycard before pocketing it and pushing the door ajar. She turns back to Rose expecting her to move but she's just as frozen in place as she is in person. The truth becomes evident even unspoken, Rose could stop herself but she couldn't say no. Could walk away again but never for long.

Their six months apart was admirable, really, and they'd had a good run, but every time they part ways somehow they always seem to circle back and wind up at each other's door again. It isn't just each other they can't untangle themselves from it's the inevitability. It's a dance, but just as much it's destiny. A fate Rose still tries to overthrow. Luisa's the last person to play games but if Rose insists on turning this into one she'll have to make room for two.

Luisa stretches, leans up and and presses her lips to the corner of Rose's mouth in the hope she might thaw. She pulls away, and before she dives into the relative safety of her room she whispers,

"Your move."


	2. she looks at her girlfriend and feels like she is in love with a whirlwind

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally f i n a l l y I finished this. Sorry it took forever, this part turned out harder to actualise and longer than I expected. Thank you so much to everyone that's commented or left kudos on any part of this series, it really means the world. As ever thank you to [shatterthelight](http://archiveofourown.org/users/shatterthelight) who without none of this would have happened.

Rose is alone.

A state of being that's run on well past chronic. Her husband and his son are off spinning webs out of contrails and streaking them across the sky, building networks of white and working to throw their net out over every nearby state and ensnare more money, more power. The irony is their business model is not dissimilar to her own, but her practices are driven underground. Her empire swells, silent beneath their feet. Rose conquers the earth from beneath its crust and no one notices as she breaks ground from below.

She's not quite grateful for the break but the reprieve is welcome, respite from fake smiles and feigned interest and fake attraction to man she resents more with every passing day. As much as she hates to admit it, she's weary. So many of the struggles that accompanied this role were new and already they've grown tiresome. Resentment itself is something that requires more emotional investment than she ever thought she had the capacity for, and yet these days it's an unremitting undercurrent she cannot seem to staunch.

It's easier when he's not around. Easier to tread stilling waters and rest from swimming against the tide. In part. Partly she doesn't know what to do with herself; in the absence of performing, confronted with a faceless lack of character she can't be sure she exists at all. All her more covert plans are in place and lying dormant, and she's no stranger to the patience it takes to play the long game, but it raises the platform for the voice of every variable she never accounted for.

It's maddening. That she spends so long making plans for every foreseeable aberrance, and yet her whole world has inverted itself over something as trite and trivial as tumbling, heart over head over heels, at the feet of another. Luisa is a deviation that crept up in her blindspot, love is a dalliance she never thought she'd lower herself to.

She hates being blindsided and now it's not just obscuring her vision, it's deafening. A dissonant chorus of discomposure. Shrieking and yelling and sneering about her lack of harmony ever since the introduction of a new instrument whose strings she cannot play. Luisa is the storm that disrupted her symphony and her thunder cannot be transposed. Rose's neatly inked score is smeared with raindrops and she's been unwillingly thrown into fugue state.

And now she's alone and her crisis escapes her mouth in sighs and pastes itself to the walls like paper. She's alone but her solitude is ceding its habitual claim to her brain as Luisa works her way inside her head. It’s been five hours since their exchange in the hallway and Rose is still no closer to moving herself on to less disarranging things. She sits, legs crossed as far as her skirt will allow, in a rigid chair as one hand raps polished nails against the glass topped desk.

She confines herself to that corner, refuses to pace and let her frayed nerves wear holes in the carpet. Her composure is already looking a little thin and she needn't take it out on the furnishings. Instead she glues herself in place and lets all her unease drain into her fingers as they begin to tie and untie themselves in repetitive knots, as if her own anxiety is encouraging her to take up macramé.

But the reality is less about taking mercy on the decor and more that she can't bear to stand, because every step is an aggressive reminder that beneath her is Luisa's room. Two levels below and a few suites over and she can feel a rainstorm brewing a few floors down. Bubbling brontides waiting for her move. She unknots her fingers again just to rake them through her hair as if she can comb through her perturbation and pull it free, leave her void of conflict. All that comes away are a few errant strands of auburn, and as they drift onto the carpet a memory sinks its teeth into her skull.

It struggles to surface but rakes itself up with her fingertips; despite the years of severing herself from her own beginnings and burying them deep in the graveyard of her subconscious, she lets it play. Lets the hazy picture flicker like scratched film, projected behind her eyelids. It's dark, damp, and the thick smoke of mould and spent matches fills her nose. She's seven and crouched in the corner of a basement, encouraging sparks onto a small pile of leaves with infant hands.

The match lights on the third strike, and she stares at the flame as it devours the splinter of wood with ease, waits until it’s just begun to singe her fingers before she releases the fire starter and it falls into the middle of her makeshift kindling. The flame chews its way through the desiccated leaves in seconds before there’s nothing but smoulder. Rose’s hands start to tingle. Her mother told her not to play with matches but for as long as she could remember she loved to dance with danger. More than anything she loves to watch as she overpowers an element so reckless. Warm her hands on rebellion set ablaze.

Seven year old Rose presses soot-stained fingers to her nose and inhales the scent of cinders. She reaches for the small heap of sticks stacked by her side and lights another match. Two strikes this time, and it takes longer than the leaves until the twigs are reduced to embers. Charred fingertips tuck a loose lock of hair behind her ear and come away with a stray strand; she tips it onto the last few flames, starts as the sparks fly up the diaphanous thread at lightning speed, smiles.

An alarm begins to shriek, pierces the memory until it’s riddled with holes and Rose is back in the room, hotel interior blinking back into focus. She frowns at the unremitting wail before her brain catches up to the present and she realises it belongs to a car, detecting force rather than flame.

Rose picks herself up and paces to the balcony doors, pulls them shut in an attempt to drown out the sound. No sooner has she returned to her chair when it cuts off abruptly, and her thoughts stagger back to the basement.

She'd stopped carrying matches when she was fifteen. Found other methods to exact control on the uncontrollable, all stemming from her taste for dust. Only now she’d wandered into Luisa’s rain and it pours over her like absolution, balm to her burns. Rose shakes her head, she’s spent so long turning ash to ash, returning bodies to the earth and divining what lives and what dies and now she’s being forced to face the fact she’s not fireproof. Admit that in the end there’s no one lonelier than death.

 

**_..._ **

 

The doorway into the land of dreams is something Rose has always been able to unlock. The rest of humanity likes to suggest insomnia is a side effect of a demagnetised moral compass, but she has never suffered anything symptomatic of guilt, or remorse, or regret.  

Not until now.

Now it’s day four of pressing her eye up to the keyhole of sleep as she wrestles with the door handle, day four of her strictly regimented nine hours being disobeyed by her freshly discovered conscience. Day four of being unable to lose herself in the luxury of an empty bed and the fourth night she’s found herself in the realm that exists after midnight. Wrestling with a sleepless space, 3AM and liminal.

Rose sighs from the furthest reaches of her weary limbs, pulls at a loose thread on the arm of the couch, that in the absence of sleep somehow provides more comfort than the bed. Moonlight spills through a crack in the curtains and pools on the carpet, a softened silver slant she wants to dive into, submerge herself in the shadows that come alive in the dark.

Rose reaches out a hand, captures the light on the tips of her fingers, pulls back before it can illuminate her palms. It bounces off the crimson polish on her nails, sneers, drips wet like fresh bloodstains. A condemnation of character confined to a place she can control. The luminous puddle of moonbeams looks less inviting by the second, and her newly unearthed capacity for reflection reminds her where the moon derives its glow. It whispers that they’re not so different, that she could banish so many shadows if she just mirrored a little more of Luisa’s light.

Luisa who is something like the sun, burning so bold and bright and searing the surface of Rose’s skin, burning up her belief that she’s nothing more than every star that’s already dead. An illusion of light, of life.

Rose sighs again, from mind more than body, and all at once she despises what she’s become. Reduced to a shell of burnt flesh and restless bones, something entirely too feeling for her own convenience. The unease chews through her muscles, and some practical part of her brain still managing to function inspires her to stand, reminds her that she still hasn’t stripped herself of today’s ensemble of chiffon and silk. She walks to the closet in stockinged feet just for the movement to shake free every splinter of despair at her own fallibility. The shards collect in a vengeful fist and before Rose can excise each fragment of feeling her elbow pulls back like an invisible bowstring, and lets fly just to connect to the wall with a sickening crunch.

Rose winces loudly, swears louder, chastises herself for the uncharacteristic externalisation of emotion. This time the blood is very real, pinpricking her split knuckles before it swells into sizeable droplets and threatens to fall. Every pragmatic instinct kicks back in at once like an adrenaline shot to the heart of fatigue. Rose cups her uninjured hand beneath the slow rivers of red that have begun to snake through her fingers, before she hastens to the bathroom, wraps her hand in tissue and glares at the inelegant swaddling in relative disgust.

“Shit.” The groan sinks into the dark in defeat, and as red blossoms slowly through white so does the realisation that this might just require expertise outside her remit. Rose groans again, berates herself for the sudden lack of control that’s now forcing her to call on the one doctor she knows for a fact will be awake at this hour. The one person she can conceive exposing herself to as human.

By some aggravating convenience her phone is where she left it, resting innocently on the small shelf above the sink. Rose clutches the bloodied wad of paper encircling her right hand and reaches for her phone with the other, pulls up her recent contacts and swipes to the bottom of the list.

She straightens as she brings the phone to her ear, clears her throat as it starts to ring. Once. Twice. And just as she envisages hurling the damn thing across the room before the third ring can finish it’s cut short by a soft click, a pause, and,

_“Do you know what time it is?”_

Rose purses her lips, recognises she’s expressed far too much already and tamps down any lingering thread of emotion.

“Can you come to my room?” She asks, voiding her tone of anything that could suggest why.

_“Is this a booty call?”_

Rose rolls her eyes. “You should be so lucky.”

_“Ouch.”_

_Yeah._ Rose thinks. _Exactly._

“I assume you have a first aid kit?” Rose braces herself for the oncoming concern.

_“I- Of course. Are you okay?”_

Rose grips the makeshift bandages tighter, inspires a fresh round of little stabbing pains in her torn skin.

“Can you just come?” Rose squeezes her eyes shut, opens them before she sets lines into her brow. “Please.”

_“Two minutes.”_

It takes three. Rose hovers by the door and the extra handful of seconds between the line going dead and the gentle knock at her door is long enough for her to start to worry about precisely what she’s supposed to say.

Rose collects herself, pulls open the door to be met with Luisa, bright as ever, no trace of sleeplessness beneath her eyes – unlike the shadows that are bruising through Rose’s concealer. Regardless she wears worry around her eyes and Rose ushers her inside before she’s forced to dwell on it.

Rose closes the door as softly as she can manage and turns to Luisa. Luisa waves the large first aid kit at her, searches Rose’s expression so thoroughly she doesn’t catch sight of the bloodied mess that is her right fist.

“What’s the damage?” Luisa asks.

Wordlessly, Rose raises her hand and watches Luisa’s eyes go wide.

“Jesus.”

“I don’t think it was his fault.”

A smile tugs at the corners of Luisa’s lips but she reins it in, sets the case on the coffee table and walks over to Rose. Before she can protest, Luisa takes Rose’s hand in her own and leads her to the couch.

“Sit.” She commands, and Rose refuses to take orders from anyone but she’s worn down and wounded and her knees buckle without permission.

Rose expects questions, a demand for details, but Luisa has no apparent interest in interrogation. She sits beside her, pulls the kit into her lap and turns her attention back to Rose’s hand. She coaxes clenched fingers out from their palm and slowly she unwinds the tissue, unwraps the injury like a gory gift and inspects the damage. Luisa probes around the broken skin with an agonising tenderness, presses gently on rapidly discolouring skin.

“You can still make a fist? Move your fingers?”

Rose wiggles her fingers in response.

“Good. It’s not broken then.”

Luisa lets go of her hand and unzips the case, extracts gauze and surgical tape and continues to search through the remaining contents until Rose can’t stand the silence any longer.

“Aren’t you going to ask me what happened?” Rose blurts.

“I figured you would tell me if you wanted.” Luisa muses without looking up, pauses. “Shit.”

“What?” Rose replies.

“Out of antiseptic.” She looks up as Rose raises her eyebrows. “I injure myself a lot too.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

Rose’s own concern about the threat of infection is overpowered by her growing desire for this whole situation to be over as soon as possible. Luisa shakes her head, sets the case back on the coffee table and makes a beeline for the minibar.

“What are you doing?” Rose puzzles, fully aware that Luisa is the last person that should be drinking, particularly right now.

“I’m guessing they don’t take the alcohol out of _your_ fridge.”

She pulls it open, scans the shelves and pulls out two small, clear bottles. Luisa returns to the couch and unscrews the first bottle, holds it out to Rose.

“Is this a recognised treatment?” Rose gibes.

“For pain? Absolutely.”

Rose clicks, accepts the vodka miniature and downs it easily.

Luisa watches, almost looks impressed. She uncaps the second bottle, takes Rose’s hand again and pauses before she tips the contents over the dried blood and grazes.

“This will probably hurt.” She warns.

Rose grits her teeth, refuses to even blink as the burning spirits bathe her skin and banish all trace of bacteria. Luisa offers her the second half of the bottle, Rose shakes her head and places it back on the table.

They return to silence, and Rose watches how diligently Luisa pours over her, how carefully and compassionately she cradles her hand and cleans her up. She isn’t sure she’s ever seen Luisa so at ease, so entirely in her element. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that she finds peace in amelioration, but the lightness with which she’s piecing Rose back together is a reminder, so pointed it’s becoming painful, of precisely why until now Rose has failed to reach out.

Rose turns her eyes to the open bottle, restrains a sigh and reaches for it, swallows the remaining liquor in one. Luisa glances up briefly before dropping bloodied tissues on the table, they litter the glass surface like fallen petals. She extracts a small pair of scissors from the first aid kit and cuts a neat piece of gauze, holds it in place with her thumb and uses her teeth to tear strips of tape from the roll held in her other hand.

“I punched a wall.” Rose states. As if it’s the most natural thing in the world.

“Hardcore.”

Luisa sticks the bandage in place, pulls back and admires her work.

“Ideally you want that wrapped around your palm too but I guessed you wouldn’t want something so...” She pauses, searches for the appropriate word. “Inhibiting.”

Rose has to smile. “You guessed correctly.”

Luisa nods, packs the first aid kit back up and gathers up the bottles and tissues, throws them away as Rose stays put on the couch and inspects her patched up hand. Luisa returns and hovers, noticeably more uncomfortable than minutes ago when she was immersed in contusions and blood.

Rose looks up, swallows painfully and shuts down the hesitancy on Luisa’s face with the brusque suggestion of, “You should probably go.”

Luisa deflates, visibly, she turns to leave and Rose walks her to the door but Luisa turns back before she can open it. Luisa glances at Rose’s hand, then lifts her own and lays her palm across Rose’s cheek.

“You’re going to need that changed.” Luisa advises.

Rose responds with a curt nod. Luisa drops her hand, and slips out of the door without another word.

Rose sighs and an unknown amount of tension exits her body on hearing the snick of the latch. The liquor has soaked quickly through her empty stomach and Rose can feel its slow blur disseminate through her veins; she only just makes it to the bed before collapsing, fully clothed, and for the first time in four days, she sleeps.

 

**_..._ **

 

Rose has always loathed the colour of week-old bruises; the sickly green that seeps into ugly yellow, etiolates like a sun-starved plant. As she hangs up the phone she grimaces at the sight of the pale ochre still staining her knuckles around a mosaic of scabs, as if she’s been dragging her hands through the dirt. She may as well have, lowering herself like that seems preferable to the way she’d let her emotions get the better of her.

Her phone screen lights up again, a followup apology from Emilio who’d rung to inform her he’d be extending his trip. She ignores it.

The desk is atypically chaotic, blanketed with paint swatches she’s supposed to be submerged in as if they’re really that stimulating, as if she hadn’t known exactly which shade was right an hour ago, as if the whole task isn’t an affront to her intellect. Rose gathers the multicoloured cards and stacks them neatly, wonders for a fleeting second how long they’d take to burn, before the banal display of neatness slows the seconds down even more, and she’s left shouting into the dismal cave of her own boredom.

She isn’t displeased she’ll be alone for another two weeks, she won’t have to slide herself back into her trophy wife facade as soon as she expected, and it’s a relief not to force her body back into something that wears tighter than her most skin-fitting dress. But at least then she’d have something to _do_. Even in character, even in a role so rehearsed it becomes second nature, going though their motions is still more inspiring than this.

Rose struggles not to sigh and inspects her hands; immaculate nails, battered knuckles, obnoxious jewellery. She never predicted the wealth of problems that accompany the ring, and it’s moments like these when it seems like the heaviest thing in the world. She’s never taken it off, silently swore to herself that she wouldn’t until a day in the distant future, but it’s weighing more by the second and the reminder of this role feels more like an anchor than a necessity, dragging her down, slowing her pulse. It comes off without a fight, clatters loudly onto the desk.

The relief isn’t what she’d hoped, there’s no trace of the ring left except a gentle groove at the base of her finger, but the heaviness lingers like atrophy, dead weight. Despite it she can’t help but admire the way her hand looks now, neat, untarnished, with no iridescent indication of ownership; her right hand is another story, she can’t decide who those bruises belong to, the act was so out of character, its motives the result of another. She wants to banish them, be free of the broken blood vessels that hover derisively beneath the surface of her skin. They’re the epitome of sore spot, and every time she flexes she feels her own frailty in the spaces between her fingers. An aching aide-memoire.

Between the absence of activity making her brain feel like it’s slowly turning to mush, and the persistence of her own human condition branded across her knuckles, Rose is desperate for distraction.

She picks up her phone, deigns to offer Emilio a generic reply that is suitably swathed in false sentiments of just how much she’ll miss him, enough to seem interested without expending any real effort. So why does the lack of substance still seem to subtract something from her? She’s never given him anything more than the construct of a woman she’d tailored to him, and the pattern was simple enough to stitch.

Men overshadowed by old loss are easy; they like to think their scars are stale, but it only takes one shiny new creature to lick their wounds before they reopen. Soon they’re so distracted they don’t notice she’s sinking her own teeth in, right down to the bone. She won’t just lick the blood from their lips she’ll feast on it, snap their necks between her jaw and pick over the carcass. Sometimes she’ll crack open skulls just to see what’s inside.

Rose has only ever known one person to blunt her claws, Luisa offers her throat up to her fangs freely but Rose can’t bring herself to bite, and somehow the only one left with teethmarks is her; they riddle her ribs, gnaw at the bars that encage her heart. The dusk-choked sun still reaching its way into her room prompts the shadows to stretch; Rose can feel the onset of evening and the threat of the moon, and the animal in her has a desire for something to chew.

Rose swipes through to her contacts, taps the name uncomfortably close to the top, and presses the phone to her ear as she tells herself she’s in control, tells herself she made this choice and it doesn’t make _her_. It only rings twice.

_“Two calls in a week, have you taken to beating up more than walls?”_

_God she sounds smug._

Rose glances round the obsessively clean room. “Yes, it’s like a construction site up here, are you any good with plaster?”

_“Not even limbs, I was hungover for the majority of the osteo rotation.”_

“Do I need to get a second opinion on the potential breaks in my hand?” Rose replies drily.

_“I second my own opinion that full range of movement was observed by the attending practitioner.”_

Rose’s wit escapes her and they’re left straddling silence, it extends like an echo of the evening shadows until Luisa, as usual, poses the impossible question.

_“What made you ring?”_

Blunt. As ever. Giving Rose little room for ambiguity.

“Do you make house calls?”

_“Not usually but I suppose I could bend the rules given I’m already in the building.”_

“What else are rules for?” Rose postulates.

_“A woman after my own heart, try not to punch anything else without me.”_

The line goes dead, and Rose can’t help but smile until she’s hit with the aggravating awareness that she’s once again waiting on the woman she keeps trying to leave behind. Waiting for her to walk into the belly of the beast but waiting all the same. This time Luisa takes a full five minutes, and by the time Rose hears the enthusiastic knock she’s almost considering not answering. Regardless she finds herself at the door, pulling it open for Luisa to sweep inside and waltz right into the heart of her turbulence.

Luisa wanders around the room, runs her fingertips over the back of a chair, the edge of the desk, a section of wall. She comes to a stop by the couch, sits heavily and inspects the pad of her index for inexistent dust, wearing a grave expression.

“You’re right, complete chaos in here.”

She looks up, glances at Rose’s crossed arms, smiles.

“Nice paint swatches.”

Rose wrinkles her nose.

“A hoteliers wife’s work is never done.”

Luisa’s smile freezes, falters, and she narrows her eyes.

“Weren’t you supposed to be driving to the airport?”

Rose attempts to avoid answering.

“I wouldn’t have been driving.”

Luisa doesn’t reply, presses her with silence.

“Change of plan.” Rose relents.

“What does that make me, backup?”

Now it’s Luisa’s turn to fold her arms, and she leans back, rests her feet up on the coffee table, haphazardly crossed at the ankles. Rose moves to her desk, sinks into the rigid chair as part of her is screaming to be sat at Luisa’s side and part insists this way it’s safer. Rose rests her elbow on the desk, runs a hand through her hair, wonders why Luisa is always willing to resort to being second choice. Rose knows she’s worth more than runner-up, and it stings to consider that Luisa doesn’t feel the same but she still can’t resent her readiness to only ever be prized as a consolation. She knows it’s selfish, to fuel Luisa’s sense that she only exists after disappointment, but Rose has always lusted after the unattainable, and after spending her life unsure she’d ever get her hands on what it feels like to be alive, she can’t let go now that she’s found it.

Or rather it’s found her, struck her over and over like incorrigible lightning that emanates from Luisa’s electricity.

Rose lifts her eyes to the ceiling.

“Maybe this is my ‘move.’”

Luisa snorts. “Yeah, you lost any upper hand when you called me at 3AM bleeding all over the place.”

Rose decides to use Luisa’s own proclivity for candour against her.

“Why are _you_ here?” She probes.

“You asked me to come.”

“You didn’t have to.”

“I’m a sucker for redheads and mystique.”

The silence bloats again. Rose wants to be honest but the weight of what she withholds is all she has left. It’s not just her teeth she lies through, her mouth is open wide and untruths have a tendency to pour forth on every outward breath. Luisa releases all her frustration in a sigh and stands abruptly, looks at Rose in supplication that she can only sustain for a few seconds.

“I honestly don’t know why you asked me here.” She snipes.

Her audible hurt stabs Rose from across the room, and she walks to the door and she’s reaching for the handle and all Rose can offer as she starts to open it is a half-hearted murmur of, “I don’t know why you came.”

Luisa pauses, Rose watches her turned back and the rise and fall of her shoulders before she spins to face her once more, defiant, desperate.

“Because you’re the only person that’s ever looked at me like more than a chalk outline on the fucking sidewalk.”

Rose needs no more encouragement to act, she crosses the space between them like the last few steps over a finish line and lays her hands, ring-free and bruised, on either side of Luisa’s face. Luisa doesn’t move, searches her expression for something Rose can’t place but doesn’t have time to try before she leans in and sets fire to their flesh. Luisa kisses her in open strokes and Rose’s darkness curls into her like a thirsting tongue.

As ever Luisa leads, steers Rose to the bed and helps her shed clothes on the way, relegates herself and gives before taking. Only when Luisa’s kiss descends, lips to jaw to collarbone, does Rose look over Luisa’s exposed shoulder and sees the door is still ajar. She wants to say something, rationally she knows she should but there’s danger in the shadows and voices that bend round the doorframe and the thrill runs a fresh crop of goosebumps over her skin.

Rose lets her head fall back against the pillows and closes her eyes, bathes in the glow of skin meeting skin and the rising tide of risk in her failure to secure the room. Luisa covers her, kisses her, something foreign with unfamiliar reverence, as she whispers promises into Rose’s once lifeless skin, lays claim to a wasteland. Luisa kneels at the altar of her hips and inscribes psalms into the most intimate of places with her lips and tongue.

Rose opens her eyes and Luisa is there now, at the foot of her bed, genuflecting, reaching for a taste of heaven. Rose buries her face in the crook of her elbow and unbidden pleas to something holy escape her mouth and she breathes Luisa’s name like a prayer.

They are two seraphs tangled on a queen bed, agents of a higher power wrapped in human skin and serving the divinity that escapes their mouths in sighs. Luisa bites and sucks and bruises, defaces sacred skin, guides Rose all the way to the next plane like a reckless god.

 

**_..._ **

 

The water is hot, tropical rain that collects in every dip and notch of her frame, rock pools in each fossae of her spine. Rose savours every baptismal second spent in the shower, between identities it’s the closest thing she knows to rebirth, scrubbed raw and clean and new. But every little blessing is always accompanied with a curse, and from the moment she steps into the steaming streams, the tiled alcove always transcends into a space just detached enough from reality to induce introspection.

As it is her self-examination is taking an existential turn, and stuck in a salacious loop of flashbacks of the night before, she’s starting to wonder who she’s become. She chose this name for all its thorns, never expected anyone would make her bloom, and yet she’s becoming someone who isn’t fashioned so much as has flowered. She didn’t choose this person, but she’s growing increasingly aware that outside of her next alias there’s someone she can’t help but choose, someone whose sunlight she can’t help but bask in. Luisa nourishes her like autumn rain, warm and wet and wished-for, and Rose is blossoming into something that breathes. Bleeds.

She’s not just tripped into this rabbit hole, she’s dived right in, headfirst. Heart first. Falling deeper into this world of madness she can’t help but admit feels more and more like home. At least she assumes, she has little frame of reference.

It isn’t a game anymore it’s straight up war, and with no clear lines drawn between head and heart loving Luisa is a losing battle. There’s no white flag, just a roiling red sea of bloody fallout; and as much as she’s addicted to what it means to be alive, for her it’s the most dangerous kind of thrill to seek, a hazard for the woman rubbing shoulders with Hades and dining with Death – and after all, she’s always looked exceptional in black.

Rose turns her face to the heated jets and finds herself in the downpour. She’s always rained down around people like hail; hard, heavy, sweeping through as an indiscriminate storm, a violent kind of snow. Now she’s melting, she’s a stuttering of states and Luisa has her surfing a wave that has no choice but to break. The hardest part is confessing she doesn’t mind being lost in this sea, doesn’t even mind being dashed against the rocks because she always washes up on Luisa’s shore.

Rose’s mind moves back to the night before, bestridden and shipwrecked in an ocean of Egyptian cotton. The rush of the water drowns in the blood beating in her ears, and there’s an ache between her thighs invoked by more than the fading violets Luisa planted there like a graveside offering. Her fingers find their way to starved places and the back of her hand crushes the inflorescence of bruises like pressing petals in a book. She presses down as if she can push them back beneath the surface, whilst encouraging them to stay.

Once more she comes undone at the hands of her own humanity, but this time it doesn’t hurt to unravel.

 

**_..._ **

 

“What’s your favourite colour?”

Rose looks down to where Luisa’s head rests on her abdomen, warm hands tracing patterns over the red streaks her nails had singed into toned muscle less than an hour ago. Rose’s spouse-free fortnight is drawing to a close and over the past ten days they’d found solace in a small motel an hour away from the hotel and all its eyes, its obligations.

“Why?” She replies, combing the tips of her fingers though Luisa’s impossibly soft hair.

“Mine’s yellow. Like sunlight, and sunflowers.”

Rose smiles at that, because of course it is. Luisa _embodies_ sunlight, any other answer would be out of character.

“White.” Rose says simply.

It’s crispness, cleanliness, lack of corruption. Blank canvases and new beginnings, a begging to be burnt.

Luisa’s finger spirals round a freckle at the base of Rose’s ribcage, she pauses, presses her lips to it, then returns to her abstract work scribbling featherlight swirls onto flesh.

“Bonus points for flower.” Luisa muses.

“Sorry?” Rose comes to a halt on the invisible knot of confusion and a much more tangible tangle her fingers encounter behind Luisa’s ear.

“I told you mine.”

Rose wonders if Luisa can hear the extra beat her heart inserts into its pulse, the slight quicken of pace as Luisa pries pieces of honesty from her like splinters from fingertips. She can taste the answer on her tongue and her impulse is to curl around it, lock it behind her lips. Any remorse absent from every other interaction seems to bottle inside her until unstopping in moments like these, when she’s compelled to slip untruths into Luisa’s offering warmth, like poison in tea.

“Lilies.” Rose gives back, although it feels like giving in.

She loves how they firework in colourful sprays, their cloying scent and silent splendour and what the white ones denote.

“Not roses?” Luisa teases, curling her palm around Rose’s hip and drawing a circle over bone with her thumb.

“A little on the nose, don’t you think?”

Luisa looks up, grins, and propels herself upwards to kiss the tip of Rose’s nose before she can complain. Rose mouths mock horror, just for Luisa to trace along her Cupid’s bow with her middle finger. She moves her hand to rest along the line of Rose’s jaw, leans in and waits to be met. Luisa kisses like resurrection, swallows the taste of death from Rose’s lips that devour everything they touch, plump and red and poison, berries from a yew.

Luisa pulls back, as always too soon, nudges into Rose’s neck and sucks lightly at the pulse point.

“Speaking of noses...” Luisa mumbles into reddening skin. “What’s your favourite scent?”

An amused sigh pulls itself from Rose’s throat.

“What is this, the Spanish Inquisition?”

Luisa nips at her collarbone.

“Por favor, señora.”

 _Woodsmoke._ Rose thinks.

That answer’s the easiest, but it comes from a place she doesn’t like to revisit. From a child’s hands and hiding in basements. From fire.

She twines a silken lock around her finger.

_The smell of your hair._

But she can’t say that either and Luisa’s still waiting so Rose racks her brain for something generic and regrets it when her answer of, “Vanilla.” Causes Luisa to look up and wrinkle her nose.

“Boring.”

“You asked.”

Regardless Luisa seems sated, and she returns to her tender exploration of skin; a path she’s charted countless times before but still makes Rose feel anew, rediscover what lies beneath her surface. Usually, being confronted with the fact she is human is abrupt, jars her newfound flesh and bones and knocks the air from the parts of her still requiring oxygen to operate. But Luisa’s hands at her throat are the only thing that’s ever let her breathe, and her touch lets her down, lays her down, gently in the arms of her own humanity.

In this room she loves her like endings, like fullstops and almosts and what could be but never will. At the hotel it’s different, all rushed breath and borrowed time and over before it begins. Here they can stop the world for just a moment, take their time and learn what it is to love slowly. And Rose wants nothing more than to stay here. Entwined in both their scars. But Luisa is the one fire she didn’t set, and she doesn’t know how long they have left to burn. She’s combing through ash on the off-chance of embers and blowing on them, desperate to relight now they’ve run out of matches.

The thought causes Rose to tense, solidify sinew. Luisa pauses, lips hovering above Rose’s sternum, glances up.

“What is it?” She asks, ever in tune with Rose’s breath.

“We can’t do this forever.” Rose insists gently.

She expects a frown, a sigh, something. Anything. Instead Luisa turns her attention back to the trail of little kisses she’s intent on leaving in the wake of her descension.

“Then you’d better make the most of me.”

Luisa bows her head, presses her lips to old bruises like revisiting scripture, and makes Rose forget everything from the smell of smoke to her own name, everything between this world and the next.


End file.
